May, 16 2016, 12:00pm EDT

For Immediate Release
Contact:
Todd True, Earthjustice, 206-343-7340, ext. 1030, ttrue@earthjustice.org
Susan Jane Brown, Western Environmental Law Center, 503-680-5513, brown@westernlaw.org
Joseph Vaile, Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center, 541-488-5789, joseph@kswild.org Â
Glen Spain, Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, 541-689-2000, fish1ifr@aol.com
Steve Holmer, American Bird Conservancy, 202-888-7490, sholmer@abcbirds.org
Nick Cady, Cascadia Wildlands, 314-482-3746, nick@cascwild.org
John Kober, Pacific Rivers, 503-915-6677, john@pacificrivers.org
Groups Protest Oregon Timber Plan Riddled With Loopholes
Latest BLM Plan Increases Clearcutting and Dismantles Streamside Forest Protections for Clean Water, Salmon, and Communities
WASHINGTON
Today, Earthjustice and the Western Environmental Law Center, on behalf of 22 conservation and fishing groups, filed a formal protest with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) objecting to its proposed management plans for western Oregon. The BLM plan eliminates protections for streamside forests, increases clearcutting, and removes 2.6 million acres of these federally managed public forests from the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan.
The plan proposes to increase logging levels by 37 percent, which will boost carbon emissions and make the forest less resilient to climate change and other disturbances. But the fishing organizations are most concerned about the reduction in streamside forest protection.
"The last, best salmon habitat in Oregon is within these BLM-managed forests," said Glen Spain of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations (PCFFA), a major fishing industry trade association that also joined the petition. "Productive salmon streams are far more valuable for the salmon-related jobs they create than for the market value of the lumber you could generate from logging them. Stronger stream protection makes excellent economic sense, logging them does not!"
"Clearcutting kills fish," said Joseph Vaile of the southern Oregon-based KS Wild. "We don't need more clearcuts. We need common-sense management that protects our water sources, stores carbon in ancient forests, and keeps the public at the table."
In southern Oregon, the BLM plan would remove the Applegate Adaptive Management Area that has enabled community input in land management.
BLM first attempted to revise its resource management plans in 2008. That plan, called the Western Oregon Plan Revision (WOPR and pronounced "whopper"), was the result of a sweetheart settlement between the Bush administration and the timber industry and was withdrawn by the Obama administration in 2009, resurrected by a federal judge in 2011 in response to a timber industry lawsuit, and finally rejected by a second federal judge in 2012.
"The latest proposal is like a zombie in a bad horror movie," said Todd True, an attorney with Earthjustice. "The Bush administration's fatally flawed WOPR is back from the dead to open up protected forests to clear-cut logging."
"This plan would impact the quality of life of rural residents, drinking water quality, wildlife habitat, and carbon storage," said Susan Jane Brown, staff attorney with the Western Environmental Law Center. "We need to get this right. We must protect special places that Oregonians love while we work to restore forests and watersheds. A holistic view should drive our public land decisions - not simply finding ways to maximize logging."
The BLM's new management plan revision cuts corners scientifically and legally. It has significant problems, including:
- The proposed plan eliminates the strong water quality and habitat provisions of the Northwest Forest Plan, reducing streamside no-logging buffers by half or more (a loss of 300,000 acres of streamside reserves). These reductions threaten wild native fish, water quality, terrestrial species, and aquatic recreational opportunities.
- The proposed plan leaves many mature and old-growth forests and habitat unprotected. It includes loopholes for logging large and old trees, and would reduce buffers or eliminate survey requirements for sensitive wildlife that depend on old forest habitat.
- BLM's chosen plan represents the least ambitious carbon sequestration alternative analyzed. Over the next century, the status quo would sequester twice as much carbon.
- The BLM's plan focuses on more intensive, clearcut-style logging on nearly half a million acres of forests, abandoning the direction towards restoration of forests and watersheds under the Northwest Forest Plan.
- While additional recreation areas are designated under the plan, in many of these areas logging and off-road motorized use take precedence and could diminish the types of recreation the vast majority of Oregonians enjoy.
"Years ago, many of the BLM lands were sacrifice zones, where logging, mining, and grazing were king. Then came the Northwest Forest Plan which established a sustainable balance between conservation and management," said Nick Cady of Cascadia Wildlands. "Today, more people live and work in western Oregon because they were drawn to its recreational opportunities and amenity economy, not the extractive industries of the past. It's time for the BLM to wake up and manage these lands as the vast majority of Oregonians and Americans demand."
"The best available science shows that unsustainable logging of our public forests has harmed clean water and healthy streams, pushed wildlife toward extinction, contributed to global warming, and destroyed much of Oregon's old-growth forests," said Oregon Wild's Doug Heiken. "BLM's proposed plan is a throwback to this terrible legacy. Today, our public forests should be preserved to address new realities -- the need to mitigate global warming, recover endangered species, protect clean water, and restore ecosystem function and resilience."
"Over 1.8 million Oregonians rely on BLM lands for their drinking water," said John Kober of Pacific Rivers. "Many of Oregon's most iconic rivers, such as the Rogue, Umpqua and McKenzie are sustained by the highly effective aquatic protections that have been in place for over 20 years. Scrapping proven stream protections in order to increase timber harvest is simply too risky given the benefits that our rivers provide."
A copy of the protest is available here.
The Western Environmental Law Center uses the power of the law to safeguard the public lands, wildlife, and communities of the American West in the face of a changing climate. We envision a thriving, resilient West, abundant with protected public lands and wildlife, powered by clean energy, and defended by communities rooted in an ethic of conservation.
(541) 485-2471LATEST NEWS
'An Act of Climate Denial': Biden Faces Anti-Willow Protests After IPCC Report
"Biden will keep being haunted until he changes course," said one climate campaigner.
Mar 21, 2023
Further emboldened by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's fresh call for rapid emission cuts, campaigners are planning to rally outside the U.S. Interior Department on Tuesday morning to protest the Biden administration's approval of a massive oil drilling project that—if completed—would spew millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year.
In a press release announcing the demonstration, which is set to begin at 9:00 am ET, Fossil Free Media said those voicing outrage over the administration's decision to greenlight the project will include climate activists, social media influencers, students, and others.
The protest will coincide with President Joe Biden's planned remarks at the White House Conservation in Action Summit at the Interior Department, which signed off on a version of ConocoPhillips' Willow Project last week despite widespread opposition and warnings that it would undermine the global climate fight.
The Interior Department has estimated that the Alaska drilling project—the largest of its kind on U.S. public land—could produce nearly 580 million barrels of oil over three decades and unleash more than 270 million metric tons of planet-warming CO2. Green groups are suing the administration in an effort to stop the project, which is not expected to begin producing oil for another six years.
Jamie Henn, the director of Fossil Free Media, wrote Monday that the IPCC's report "makes it all the more clear that Biden's approval of the Willow Project was an act of climate denial and destruction."
The report, the product of years of work by hundreds of leading scientists from around the world, says greenhouse gas emissions must be cut by 60% over roughly the next decade to keep the Paris climate accord's critical warming target alive.
The Biden administration's approval of the Willow Project and other drilling—during his first two years in office, Biden outpaced former President Donald Trump in permit approvals—called into further doubt the White House's commitment to treating the climate crisis as an "existential threat."
"Reading the U.N.'s latest dire climate warnings just days after Biden approved massive new Arctic oil drilling is utterly infuriating," Shaye Wolf, climate science director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said Monday. "The fossil-fueled path to more climate disasters, mass displacements, and wildlife extinctions is bleak, but it's not inevitable."
"Chief among world leaders, Biden has the tools to not only ratchet up renewables but move us decisively off fossil fuels," Wolf added. "Scientists have mapped the way to a livable planet, but we need the political will to get us there."
On Monday, shortly following the release of the IPCC report, climate activists disrupted a Washington, D.C. event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where White House climate adviser Ali Zaidi appeared to deliver an address on the "future of U.S. climate and energy leadership."
Reutersreported that "a dozen protesters holding a sign saying 'End Fossil Fuels' chanted 'Keep your promise, no new drilling' for several minutes, preventing Zaidi from starting his remarks." Zaidi responded by pointing to the climate investments approved under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
"At the end of the day, nobody in a position of power seems to be accepting the reality and the urgency of this moment," Reilly Haught, a 23-year-old protestor from West Virginia, told Reuters. "And that's what we wanted to share with him. We just can't go on with business as usual with only the people in suits having these important conversations."
Collin Rees of Oil Change International tweeted Monday that "'climate leaders' don't approve huge fossil fuel projects like the Willow Project, which would negate most emissions reductions from the IRA even under rosy estimates."
"The IPCC is clear—no new oil + gas," Rees added. "Biden will keep being haunted until he changes course."
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Calls Mount for US to Provide Free School Meals to All Children
"Hiving off a tiny part of the public school bundle and charging a means-tested fee for it is extremely stupid," argues Matt Bruenig.
Mar 20, 2023
Minnesota last week became just the fourth U.S. state to guarantee universal free school meals, triggering a fresh wave of demands and arguments for a similar federal policy to feed kids.
"Universal school meals is now law in Minnesota!" Democratic U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, who represents the state, tweeted Monday. "Now, we need to pass our Universal School Meals Program Act to guarantee free school meals to every child across the country."
Omar's proposal, spearheaded in the upper chamber by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), "would permanently provide free breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a snack to all school children regardless of income, eliminate school meal debt, and strengthen local economies by incentivizing local food procurement," the lawmakers' offices explained in 2021.
Congressional Republicans last year blocked the continuation of a Covid-19 policy enabling public schools to provide free breakfast and lunch to all 50 million children, and now, many families face rising debt over childrens' cafeteria charges.
"The school bus service doesn't charge fares. Neither should the school lunch service."
Matt Bruenig, founder of the People's Policy Project, highlighted Monday that while children who attend public schools generally have not only free education but also free access to bathrooms, textbooks, computer equipment, playgrounds, gyms, and sports gear, "around the middle of each school day, the free schooling service is briefly suspended for lunch."
"How much each kid is charged is based on their family income except that, if a kid lives in a school or school district where 40% or more of the kids are eligible for free lunch, then they are also eligible for free lunch even if their family income would otherwise be too high," he detailed. "Before Covid, in 2019, 68.1% of the kids were charged $0, 5.8% were charged $0.40, and 26.1% were charged the full $4.33... The total cost of the 4.9 billion meals is around $21 billion per year. In 2019, user fees covered $5.6 billion of this cost."
Bruenig—whose own child has access to free school meals because of the community eligibility program—continued:
The approximately $5.6 billion of school lunch fees collected in 2019 were equal to 0.7% of the total cost of K-12 schooling. In order to collect these fees, each school district has to set up a school lunch payments system, often by contracting with third-party providers like Global Payments. They also have to set up a system for dealing with kids who are not enrolled in the free lunch program but who show up to school with no money in their school lunch account or in their pockets. In this scenario, schools will either have to make the kid go without lunch, give them a free lunch for the day (but not too many times), or give them a lunch while assigning their lunch account a debt.
Eligibility for the $0 and $0.40 lunches is based on income, but this does not mean that everyone with an eligible income successfully signs up for the program. As with all means-tested programs, the application of the means test not only excludes people with ineligible incomes, but also people with eligible incomes who fail to successfully navigate the red tape of the welfare bureaucracy.
The think tank leader tore into arguments against universal free meals for kids, declaring that "hiving off a tiny part of the public school bundle and charging a means-tested fee for it is extremely stupid."
Bruenig pointed out that socializing the cost of child benefits like school meals helps "equalize the conditions of similarly-situated families with different numbers of children" and "smooths incomes across the lifecycle by ensuring that, when people have kids, their household financial situation remains mostly the same."
"Indeed, this is actually the case for the welfare state as whole, not just child benefits," the expert emphasized, explaining that like older adults and those with disabilities, children cannot and should not work, which "makes it impossible to receive personal labor income, meaning that some other non-labor income system is required."
Conservative opponents of free school lunches often claim that "fees serve an important pedagogical function in society to get people to understand personal responsibility" and because they "are means-tested, they serve an important income-redistributive function in society," he noted. "Both arguments are hard to take seriously."
Pushing back against the first claim, Bruenig stressed that right-wingers don't apply it to other aspects of free schooling such as bus services. He also wrote that the means-testing claim "is both untrue and at odds with their general attitudes on, not just redistribution, but on how child benefit programs specifically should be structured."
A tax for everyone with a certain income intended to make up the $5.6 billion in school meal fees, he argued, "would have a larger base and thus represent a smaller share of the income of each person taxed and such a tax would smooth incomes over time," while also eliminating means-testing—which would allow schools to feed all kids and ditch costly payment systems.
As Nora De La Cour reported Sunday for Jacobin: "The fight for school meals traces its roots all the way back to maternalist Progressive Era efforts to shield children and workers from the ravages of unregulated capitalism. In her bookThe Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools, Jennifer Gaddis describes how early school lunch crusaders envisioned meal programs that would be integral to schools' educational missions, immersing students in hands-on learning about nutrition, gardening, food preparation, and home economics. Staffed by duly compensated professionals, these programs would collectivize and elevate care work, making it possible for mothers of all economic classes to efficiently nourish their young."
Now, families who experienced the positive impact of the pandemic-era program want more from the federal government.
"When schools adopt universal meals through community eligibility or another program, we see improvements in students' academic performance, behavior, attendance, and psychosocial functioning," wrote De La Cour, whose reporting also includes parent and cafeteria worker perspectives. "Above all, the implementation of universal meals causes meal participation to shoot up, demonstrating that the need far exceeds the number of kids who are able to get certified."
Crystal FitzSimons, director of school-based programs at the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC), told Jacobin, "There is a feeling that we can't go back."
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Protests—some of them violently repressed by police—broke out in Paris and cities across the nation after a parliamentary vote following the government's deeply unpopular move to raise the retirement age by two years.
Mar 20, 2023
Fresh protests erupted in Paris and other French cities on Monday after President Emmanuel Macron's government narrowly survived a pair of parliamentary no-confidence votes over bypassing the lower house of Parliament to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64.
The first parliamentary vote of no confidence, called by a small group of centrist lawmakers, fell nine votes short of the 278 needed to pass, Agence France-Presse reports. A second no-confidence vote, brought forward by the far-right National Rally, was also rejected.
The French Senate, which is dominated by right-wing parties, approved the higher retirement age last week. However, faced with the prospect of a vote shortfall in the National Assembly, Macron's government then invoked special constitutional powers to push through the retirement age hike.
The deeply unpopular policy has sparked widespread protests, some of which have drawn hundreds of thousands of people into the streets despite government bans on gatherings in locations including Place de la Concorde and the area of Avenue des Champs-Elysées in Paris.
Protests renewed following Monday's votes, with thousands of demonstrators marching in Paris alone. Videos posted on social media showed police charging protesters, spraying them with pepper spray, and beating them. One video showed officers brutalizing a person who appeared to be a photojournalist while an onlooker repeatedly shouted "it's the press!"
"We are not resigned," the Aubervilliers parliamentary group of the left-wing populist party La France Insoumise (LFI), or France Unbowed, tweeted Monday. "The fight against retirement reforms continues. All together in the street until the retirement of this unjust and illegitimate reform!"
LFI's parliamentary group in Haute-Garonne—which includes the southern city of Tolouse—tweeted that "Macron is more isolated than ever."
"The fight continues tonight," the party group said, previewing a Monday evening demonstration.
French unions are calling for a nationwide general strike on Thursday.
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